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PARTISAN REVIEW
Castlls
Surveyor wants to be accepted "not by a community, but by
an institution." He must renounce his solitude and that , says Kun–
dera, becomes his hell: "He is never alone, the two aides sent by the
Castle follow him incessantly. They watch his first act of love with
Frida, seated above the lovers on the coffee counter, and from that
moment , they never quit their bed."
Violation of solitude is also the opening theme of
The Trial.
Two
unknown men come to arrest Joseph K. in his bed, and from that
moment he has no private life . The organization dominates him,
controlling his time, forcing him to live in public while it accompa–
nies him through his trial. The organization , a totalitarian society,
acts very much like a family. They surprise you in your bed, arriving
"as your mother and father liked to ... . The public is the mirror of
the private, the private reflects the public ."
In that reflection Kundera describes the office world , a "world
of obedience," as similar to the world of the bedroom and, at the
same moment, like the Kafkaesque universe of the programmed
computer. The office clerk, a child, is a small cog in a grand admin–
istrative machine whose goal escapes him. His world is abstract,
Kundera says, and Kafka's art is that he found epic poetry in it.
"The office is not a stupid institution," Kundera quotes Kafka as
writing to Milena; "It will reveal the fantastic more quickly than the
stupid."
If, because of that vision, Kafka's accomplishment is immense,
his work is significant, not because he was politically engaged, accord–
ing to Kundera, but precisely because he was
not
engaged. The poet
and novelist do not invent, "they unveil," like history, "what man is,
what there is in him ... what his potential is. " In "Quelque Part
La Derriere" Kundera praises Kafka because he set an example for
what Kundera calls "the radical autonomy of the novel." He writes ,
"By spotlighting what he knew of the small, intimate moments of
practical life, Kafka never doubted that the ultimate evolution of his–
tory would set them in motion on the larger stage."
It is an interesting comment that illuminates Kundera's attitudes
toward the social obligations of the writer. Yet some dissidents in
Paris wondered at the conscience of a man who, having been black–
listed himself, could remain silent when a fellow writer's life is, as all
of theirs have been, threatened because of his political comments .
One explanation lies in a philosophic pessimism that goes beyond
Kundera's conception of the Kafkaesque, perhaps owing more to the
structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss . In a passage from
The Book oj Laughter and Forgetting,
Kundera says:
